


After You Kill a Tyrant

by Ember_Keelty



Series: Doll Verse [4]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-14
Updated: 2013-01-14
Packaged: 2017-11-25 13:52:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/639541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ember_Keelty/pseuds/Ember_Keelty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Response to a prompt from conceptofzero:<br/>"Jack/PM - Rag Doll au - what comes after you kill a tyrant"</p>
            </blockquote>





	After You Kill a Tyrant

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Doll Parts](https://archiveofourown.org/works/283646) by [conceptofzero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/conceptofzero/pseuds/conceptofzero). 



> Takes place after [Doll Parts](http://archiveofourown.org/works/283646) by conceptofzero and [Stand](http://archiveofourown.org/works/542856) by me, which are both part of an AU of [Like a Paper Doll](http://archiveofourown.org/works/265481) by conceptofzero, which is an AU of [Rag Doll](http://archiveofourown.org/works/117155) by me, which is an AU of [Breaking Point](http://archiveofourown.org/works/114326), which is actually canon compliant. Or, in sum: this fic takes place in an AU of an AU of an AU, and probably won't make much sense if you haven't waded through this whole increasingly complicated and self-indulgent series Coz and I have been writing together.

            In the end, it really is just a matter of persistence.  She's tried smuggling knives out of the kitchen many times before.  Either Jack caught her attempting to get into the cutlery, or he found where she hid them in the bedroom, or she pulled them out when he wasn't as distracted as she'd believed, or she failed to make a clean cut in the few seconds she had before he noticed she was armed and took them away from her.  He thought it was a game.  He thought that time was on _his_ side, that if he hurt her whenever she failed, she would eventually give up and accept the role he had in mind for her just to make the pain stop.  He was wrong, and now he's dead, and he can't hurt her ever again.

            She repeats that last part to herself over and over in her head as she looks down at the body, clutching the knife in one hand and the ring in the other.  Jack is dead and he can't hurt her.  She stares at the blood spilling onto the sheets from the stump of his finger and the gash in his neck and tries to sear the image into her memory so that she can never doubt it, but it still doesn't seem entirely real.

            It all happened so fast.  When she used to picture killing him, she liked to imagine taking the time to hurt him back, just a little, and to finally spit out all the acid words she had for so long been forced to swallow in his presence.  In her heart, though, she always knew it would be more like this.  She slit his throat almost before he had a chance to realize she'd taken his finger.  It _worked_ , and she isn't going to let herself regret it for a second.

            It takes a moment and a bit of concentration to force her fingers to unclasp from around the knife.  She has a better weapon now, the best weapon of all, and when she slips the ring on, she finds that it's so much more even than that.  Power flows through her like a liquid in her veins, and all the soreness in her body, the nearly constant small touch of pain that she had learned to accept as a part of her existence, is instantly washed away.  It doesn't soothe her mind, though.  She's still so tired, almost more tired than she can stand, and the physical relief just makes the idea of lying down and resting that much more appealing.  There are still a couple more things she has to do before that, but they won't take long.

            She tracks the Dignitary down by his scent.  She could torture _him_ , if she wanted to, but that would be pointless.  She could teleport him off to some hospitable but uninhabited planet on the other side of the galaxy and let him choose his own fate, but she isn't that kind anymore.  Instead, she materializes behind him with her sword drawn and poised to swing, and takes his head before he even knows she's come for him.

            After that, all that's left is to put some clothes on.  She doesn't want to wear the things Jack picked for her, and it's unlikely any of them would fit around her wings and tentacles even if she did.  She can always make wrappings for herself, but the question is out of what.  To her disgust and mild horror, the first thing that pops into her head is bed sheets.  She discards that thought as quickly as she can, and instead rips the curtains off the nearest convenient window.

            This palace doesn't have a real sitting room, and she isn't going back to the bedroom for anything.  The throne isn't exactly soft, but neither is it quite as hard or cold as the floor, and it's big enough for her to curl up in.  She finds it difficult to go to sleep like that.  She's used to discomfort, but all the energy the ring has instilled in her is another matter, and it keeps her awake.  So instead of sleeping, she just lies quietly with her eyes closed for hours on end, resting her head and thinking of nothing but the way Jack looked as a corpse.

             A slight but persistent chattering sound works its way into her consciousness and pulls her back to her surroundings.  It takes her a moment to identify it, but soon enough she remembers that the native people of the world Jack set up base on this time have a strange habit of grinding their long, flat-edged front teeth when they're nervous.  Palace slaves are always nervous, and they have every reason to be.  She pretends to be asleep, hoping that whoever it is will wander off and leave her alone.  Long minutes tick by, and that doesn't happen.  Eventually, she sits up with a groan and opens her eyes.

            "Oh," she says.  "It's you."  PM doesn't know the name of the alien girl standing before the throne, but she recognizes her.  She was in the kitchen when PM broke in, and all she did about it was silently point out the cutlery drawer before looking the other way.  "Thank you for earlier.  It's been a long time since anyone tried to help me."  Jack's more temporary servants are not bold people — at least, not the ones who live past their first day.  That small gesture might well have taken all the courage she had.

            "It was nothing, Your Majesty," the girl says, voice flat, eyes on the ground.  "Is there anything I can get you?"

            When she thinks about it, she realizes she could use a drink right about now:  something warm and soothing and preferably at least a little alcoholic.  It would be so simple to ask this girl to bring her one.  It would be so nice just to relax and let herself be taken care of for a little while.  And it would be so, _so_ easy, after how long her whole existence has been ruled by Jack's blatant sadism and extravagant cruelties, to forget that evil can be that subtle.

            "I'm no one's majesty," she says instead.  "You should be taking care of your own people, not me.  Sorry for the misunderstanding; this was just the first place I found to lie down."

            The girl looks up at her.  "Is it really over?" she asks, sounding just barely hopeful.  "Am I allowed to leave?"

            It isn't over, PM knows, not for these people.  They have no idea where Jack came from.  He just showed up one day and disrupted their whole civilization to make himself the center of it.  It's going to take them a long time to rebuild, and even longer to make enough sense of what happened to feel safe moving forward.  She could try to explain some things to them, but that wouldn't help.  Nothing she can do for them would help.  She looks like Jack and she's wielding his power, so no one on this planet will ever be able to trust her.  There's no place for her here.

            "You can leave," she says.  "You can do whatever you want to now.  You won't ever see me again, so don't worry.  Thank you again for your help."  Then, without waiting for a reply, she teleports off the face of the planet.

            She has no idea where she's going, but she moves throughout the universe with ease, popping in and out of worlds on a whim.  There are barren planets of rock, ice, or thick swirling gasses; lush forests and jungles of tall plants with leaves in many different, vivid colors; expanses of dark blue or green water stretching from horizon to horizon.  There's no reason to stop at any of them.  She can't even say what _would_ give her a reason to stop, not until she finds it.

            What finally brings her to a pause is a stretch of yellow sand dunes.  Many years back, she remembers, she used to catch glimpses of a place like this one in picture books and the clouds of Skaia.  This desert, unlike that one, is dotted with small and thorny shrubs, but they're few and far between.  PM recalls that once, at the very beginning, she was given a choice.  If she had made the smart decision then, she would have died a long time ago in just this kind of wasteland.

            When she decides what she's going to do, her first thought is that she'll need to take off the ring.  She's reluctant to just discard it, so she tears off a strip of her shroudwear to use to hang it around her neck.  She's thought a lot about this, actually.  She's had time to think a lot about all of her regrets, and having lost her own queen's ring is by far the worst.  Clearly her pocket was not a safe place for it, and it would have been far too presumptuous to wear it on her hand, but if only she had tried something like this...

            No.  No more "if only"s.  She has already dealt with the consequences of her failure, and it's time to move on.

            She walks.  The days burn and the nights freeze, and no amount of the tiny, dry leaves that grow on the shrubs can satisfy the hunger that starts to weaken her.  It's not as awful as it could be, knowing that she has the ring and she could make it all stop any time she wanted to.  Besides, the discomfort isn't as bad as the memories it distracts her from.  For a while she thinks that maybe she'll find something out here, maybe she'll stumble onto a town with kind strangers and another job for her to do, a means and a reason to keep living.  She does find a road, or what she thinks might be one; there's no pavement, but the ground is swept mostly clean of vegetation and marked with grooves that could have been made by the passing of wheels.  She follows it for as long as she can, half hopeful, but if it leads anywhere, that somewhere is too far away for her to reach on foot.  That's fine too.  When she finally exhausts herself, she lies down in the shade of one of the larger bushes on its edge.  If her goal were to survive, she could probably force more out of her body yet, but it isn't, so she doesn't try.

            Starving hurts, but she's used to hurting.  There are scars all over her body to speak to that, and those are just from the times Jack cut her or hit her hard enough to crack her shell.  Once she found it painful to know that he was leaving marks on her that would never fade, but she stopped letting herself think about them that way a long time ago.  They show just how hard he tried to break her — and he failed every time, so really, they're visible reminders of how much stronger her will is than his.  When she looks at them now, she feels like it's wrong for her be doing this, like it's too close to giving up when she's never given up before.  But it isn't like that at all; she's already finished her job, so there's nothing to give up on.

            She notices her mind fading faster than her body — the little flickers of illusion on the edges of her vision, the couple of times she can swear she hears someone calling to her — and it occurs to her that if she tries, she might be able to make herself believe that none of it was real.  Just to see what will happen, she tries telling herself that it was all just a bad dream.  She was given a choice, and she chose exile and wandered in the desert until she couldn't anymore.  Now she's dying and delusional, but it's all right, because Jack never touched her.  He never burned whole universes to ashes while she watched.  She never had to become the kind of person who could murder someone in their bed in order to stop him.

            Which would also mean she never got revenge for Prospit.  She never got to be sure that Jack was dead and could never hurt anyone else.  She's dying having failed at absolutely everything she tried to do.

            She feels a little bit like crying just from thinking that, which is stupid because it's nothing but lies.  That's more than enough of that, she decides.  Laying a hand over her uneven chest, she feels the shape of the ring under her shirt and pulls herself back to reality.  She's not at all sure that she's proud of what she's done, but she knows that she doesn't want to forget it.  She fought too hard for too long to just pretend it never happened and nothing good ever came of it.

            The day passes by.  When night falls, she lies on her back looking up at the stars.  They really are beautiful from here, and they're safe because of what she's done.  She's shivering cold, but she tells herself that thoughts like that are all the warmth she needs.  She's so tired she could die, but that's fine because there's nothing left for her to do but sleep.  She tries to keep her eyes open for as long as possible just to take in the stars, but she isn't sorry when she can't anymore.  Finally, she can rest.

—

            She wakes up choking.  Her arms are pinned to her sides, but struggling frees them quickly enough, and she lashes out with her claws.  Her swipe misses him — it, them, _Jack is dead and he can't hurt her_ — and she topples forward, coughing up something cold and wet onto her feet.  Whoever is with her catches her and pushes her back up into a sitting position, saying, "Steady!  Steady, now.  You awake?"

            Gradually, her head begins to clear enough for her to process her surroundings.  She's sitting on a bench in a very small, cramped room — the interior of a coach, she thinks.  Her arms felt trapped because she's wedged tightly between two large sacks stuffed full of... something.  There's another bench opposite her, and sitting there is an alien with pebbly black skin and a mane of cyan feathers, holding a canteen.  Water.  She was choking on water.

            The alien sees where she's looking and holds the canteen out to her.  "This?  Just drink slowly, hear?"  PM takes it from them and sips at it gingerly, while they fish a square of bread out of the pack on their lap and offer that as well.  She takes it, too, without even thinking, and downs it in just a few bites.  It's soft and thick and mealy, and it dulls the most painful edge off of her hunger.  The feathered person watches her eat with apparent fascination.  "What in damnation are you, anyway?" they ask.  "I thought it was a skeleton lying there, until I saw you had a face."

            PM doesn't answer, just stares out the window.  It's day now, and the coach is stopped in the middle of the road.  It doesn't look like she's been moved far from where she lay down, though it's hard to tell with a landscape so monotonous.

            "I know you can talk," her rescuer prompts her.  "Heard you in your sleep.  I've met plenty of strange people on this job, but I have to say you're the strangest yet — if you even are a person.  You don't seem much like an animal.  I'd think you were a devil if I was the superstitious sort, though I never heard of any devil getting into that kind of fix."

            "I'm from a different planet," she rasps.

            "Well I'll be!  An alien?  Really?  Like in the evening dramas on the radio?"  They pause, grinning expectantly like they think she'll elaborate, but she has nothing more to say to them.  "Say, though, if you're from so far away, how come you're speaking our language?"

            "I'm just speaking.  I don't notice languages."  It took her a long time to realize they were a thing to be noticed.  Even now, she doesn't really understand how it works, only that the Incipisphere was different from these larger universes and she is different from any of the species that live in them.

            "But that's incredible!"  The feathered person laughs in astonishment.  "You're not planning an invasion or anything though, I hope?  Not a scout or a spy?  I'd like to think I rescued a proper _ambassador_."

            "You didn't," PM tells them, then takes a deep breath and finally says it out loud: "I'm an exile."

            The feathered person's smile falls, and their eyes drop away from her.  "Well, that's the end of my fun.  Don't worry:  I know better than to ask too many questions about people who can't go home."

            PM closes her eyes for just a moment and lets those words toss around in her head.  Alien.  Exile.  Someone who can't go home.  If she lives, that's what she'll be from now on.  It's better than being Jack's doll-queen.  It's better than being a slave.

            "I wouldn't mind," she says, "if you asked my name.  Or if you told me yours."

            They smile at her again, a bit more tentatively than before.  "Fielda.  And you are?"

            "PM.  My name is PM."

            "Pleasure to meet you, PM," says Fielda, and it's the first time in over a century that anyone has called her that.

            Her own reaction creeps up on her:  she can barely process that the first few tears have fallen before she finds herself doubled over sobbing.  She knows she really shouldn't — she's dehydrated already, so it's a _terrible_ idea to waste water that way — but her body has begun something that she's powerless to stop until it's run its course.  Fielda reaches out to her as though on instinct and takes hold of her shoulders.  She flinches at first, but their hands are taloned and covered in pebbly scales and feel nothing like his, and the touch makes the cracks in whatever was holding the tears back spread.

            "Why did you rescue me?" she chokes out.

            "Now what kind of question is that?  I don't know how things are where you're from, but around here, most people wouldn't just leave a stranger to die if they could do anything about it."

            "Most of us weren't that bad either," she says quickly, because the idea that anyone could think that about Prospit _hurts_.  "It's just..."  It's just that a part of her didn't want to be rescued, and that part can't understand why she was.  She didn't necessarily _want_ to die, she just didn't see what else could possibly be left for her besides endless, lonely wandering, and even now it's hard to imagine anything more.  "I could have been dangerous."

            "What, unarmed and half-dead?  You think a woman like me can't take care of herself?"  Fielda sits back on the bench and lifts up the side of their — _her_ — shirt to reveal a revolver at her waist.  "I got attacked by bandits just yesterday.  Had to put bullets in a few of them before they got the message."  She's silent for a while, and all PM can hear are her own poorly muffled sobs.  Then, almost out of nowhere, she adds, "I don't _like_ killing."

            "You wanted to give something back."

            "Reckon maybe," Fielda says quietly.

            "I've given more than enough," she admits.  The tears run out.  She straightens herself up and takes deep breaths until she feels steady.  "I just don't know what to _do_ with myself if I'm not helping somehow.  I don't know what will make living worth it anymore."

            "We'll find something for you to do," Fielda assures her.  "Though we should probably find something for you to _eat_ , first."  She stands and reaches for the coach door.  "It might take until evening to get to the next town.  You'll be all right until then?"  PM nods, and Fielda leaves her for the driver's seat.

            In just a few moments, the coach lurches into motion.  The sacks sharing the bench with her jostle around with its movement, drawing her attention to them for the first time since she woke up.  It occurs to her to wonder what's inside of them, but no sooner does she start wondering than she suddenly suspects she might already know.  Now unbearably curious, she gets ahold of one and peers inside.

            Her first reaction is fear, because it feels like too much of a coincidence, like it can't possibly be real, and everything good that's happened must have been a dream.  It makes sense, though, when she thinks about it logically.  There are only so many kinds of people who would be driving a stagecoach down a road like this one, after all.  Her second reaction is the same feeling she had when she heard Fielda say her name, a feeling that she doesn't know a word for.  It's something so close to happiness that it hurts and frightens her, because she still doesn't believe that she can ever really be happy again.  Her hand goes to the ring hanging from her neck, because she almost can't stand this, and it makes her feel like running away and finding somewhere else to die.

            There's no reason to run, though, and she knows it.  If tomorrow she decides that it hurts too much to keep living, she can kill herself then.  She can kill herself next week, if she has to, or next month, or next year.  She doesn't have to worry about missing opportunities, because Jack is dead and he can't stop her.  For now, she might as well try to live.

            PM takes a deep breath, inhaling the pulpy, warmly bitter scent of paper and envelope sealant.  It's soothing, when she lets it be.  She does feel calmer after crying, and _clean_ in a way she hasn't felt in ages, like the salt water washed away something thick and stagnant and rotten.  She has her name back, and someone who could be a friend.  Jack is dead, and he can't hurt her.

            Tomorrow, she thinks, she'll ask Fielda if there's anything she can do to help her deliver the mail.


End file.
